Choo Relieved of His Duties
The Korean government has officially waived S.S. Choo's military obligations in light of his participation on the successful Korean national team.
over 1 year ago
odradek
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Wow, and not a minute too soon, maybe.
Though I look right at home, I still feel like an exile
by Manhattan Tribe Fan on Nov 23, 2010 6:48 AM EST reply actions
YAY! Extend him now, while Boras’s name is sullied.
by JulioBernazard on Nov 23, 2010 10:17 AM EST reply actions
I’m no longer a fan of extensions that reach into tens of millions. If we arbitrate each year and pay the freight, we reduce our exposure to the type of risk that has derailed the team in the past.
We have not been derailed by locking up players several years before they reach free agency. Not ever.
How specific do we need to be? We’ve never been derailed by any player named Shin Soo Choo? This is about committing salary to the future when there are alternatives.
I think we are only referring to guys that we are buying out arbitration years and maybe an additional year or two on top. I would agree, we have not been burnt in this scenario yet.
The key to your comment is “yet”. As the amount of money required to lock up players continues to escalate, the risk/reward ratio changes. How much can we hope to save by taking on how much added risk? My feeling is that we are working with too many dollars in this case to justify committing future years salary when we have the option of renting one year at a time.
The key to your comment was “has derailed this team in the past.” Your initial thesis was absolutely wrong, but that doesn’t give you license to completely change the parameters of the discussion.
Come on, four billion!
I am no longer a fan of extensions that reach tens of millions. This practice has burned Cleveland in the past. Giving Choo an extension guaranteeing him much money out into future years when we are allowed to rent him year to year is a way of avoiding that.
The renting is less cost-effective than the locking up, and as Jay mentioned, Cleveland hasn’t gotten burned on that type of deal. Believe it or not, not every deal reaching into the tens of millions is the same.
Come on, four billion!
Not only is every deal not the same, the same deal means different things to different teams. A $30M commitment represents a much larger percent of revenues for Cleveland than NY. So, the risk meter for each club is drastically different.
I understand that Cleveland has a history of good experiences extending developing talent. I do not think we should assume that it guarantees us a future of superior outcomes. And the higher salary levels increase pressure for positive outcomes on teams with low revenues. At some point the correct decision is NO.
I am no longer a fan of extensions that reach tens of millions. This practice has burned Cleveland in the past.
Name one, other than potentially Hafner.
Potentially? Oh, that’s rich.
We got burned on the Westbrook deal pretty badly. The Lawton deal was pretty ugly, too. Kerry Wood. Arguably David Justice. Charles Nagy.
Lockup deals, however, are different.
Justice? Never lower than 114 OPS+ and they turned him into Westbrook, Bradley/Gutierrez, and two months of Davide Segui. Also, he threw his helmet at Troy Percival and that was worth the money all by itself.
Though I look right at home, I still feel like an exile
by Manhattan Tribe Fan on Nov 24, 2010 4:28 PM EST up reply actions
Averaged 1.7 WAR per season over that contract, at a cost of $7 million per. What do you think the dollars-per-win figure was 12 years ago?
I found a Dave Cameron article, here, stating it was $2.6 million in 2002. If it was close in 1998, that doesn’t seem disastrous.
Though I look right at home, I still feel like an exile
by Manhattan Tribe Fan on Nov 27, 2010 8:58 PM EST up reply actions
Interesting, because the Indians reportedly viewed the Justice contract as a liability at the time. I was a little mystified by that report, at the time, but eventually concluded that they just felt they could do better with the $7 million, in 2000 and in the future.
The Indians saved about $1 million by swapping out Justice (indirectly) for David Segui, and while Justice thrived in New York, Segui performed about as well as Justice had been performing before the trades.
That season, the savings were spent almost to the dollar on Wickman and Bere, with Sexson and Woodard’s salaries canceling one another out. It’s hard to remember, ten years later, just how badly we really needed an infusion of even just adequate pitching.
Getting back to the main point, though, we gave up the last two years of Justice’s contract, $14.8 million for his age 35 and 36 seasons, over which he contributed 1.7 WAR as it turned out.
We also gained one year of Wickman at reasonable cost, as well as multiple years of Woodard. And Jake Westbrook’s first seven years, and Zach-Milton-Gutierrez-Valbuena.
The only one I could think of was Jaret Wright, if you’re talking about lock-up deals. I would have said Fausto Carmona before this season.
Has anyone looked at Choo’s present value with a real options analysis? I don’t have a good handle on the probabilities of different outcomes, or otherwise I’d do it myself.
I get what elsandito is saying. The option to extend a player or not (before committing the money) has value.
There’s a point where extending Choo just isn’t worth it, and any good agent (such as Boras) will have a knack for pushing that limit.
We need to be specific enough to say, we’ve done a dozen deals that are generally like this and haven’t really been burned yet.
Deals like this are about cost certainty. We’ve saved plenty of money along the way. Turning it around, to not do a deal like this, at the right price, is just throwing money away. The way we know this for sure is, it’s what the Yankees would do.
The Yankees are able to do things that would not be wise for the Indians to do. So, I’m not sure that the Yankees doing something would be the measure of knowing for sure.
The Yankees go year-by-year with arbitration-eligible players because they can afford the financial risks of doing so.
You seem to be missing this point completely: Below a certain contract cost, going year-to-year is more risky than doing a long-term deal.
Ryan Howard was looking forward to an arbitration salary of either $14 million or $18 million in his fifth year, going even higher in his sixth year. The Phillies ended up giving him a three-year deal for $54 million. Should the Phillies have given him a four-year deal a year earlier, probably for the same amount? Of course they should have.
Should the Indians allow something even slightly similar to that happen with Choo, if they can help it? Of course not.
I’m confused. First, you implied that NY doesn’t go year to year and we should follow their lead. Then, you stated they go year to year. Then you point out that the more money we commit, the less risk is involved because above a certain contract cost a long term deal is less risky. As you can see, I have missed the point completely and, to this moment, continue to miss it. Perhaps all this is beyond me and I best be satisfied with conceding your point.
I don’t think I was clear about the Yankees. They do not do lockup deals with their young players; they go year-to-year. If a player has a huge year and is going to command a huge salary in arbitration, that’s something they can absorb. In our case, however, it likely would force a trade situation.
We can afford a few eight-figure salaries. What we can’t afford is eight-figure uncertainty year-to-year.
In fairness, I should point out that the Choo deal is sort of a tweener, in that he is already eligible for arbitration. The long list of our lockup deals involves, in almost every case, players who were still a year away from arbitration, which increased the value of a long-term deal to the player (instant millions) and decreased the total contract cost to us. We had a couple of extreme cases where a player established himself while still being TWO years away from arbitration at the end of the year.
The Choo deal won’t be the no-brainer that those deals were, but if we can buy out his 2013 season at reasonable cost now, that’s still a smart bet. If we can get a 2014 club option, even better. Typically, the Indians have not done deals like this without converting a free agent season into a club option season; that in itself is quite valuable.
The Choo deal won’t be the no-brainer that those deals were, but if we can buy out his 2013 season at reasonable cost now, that’s still a smart bet.
With Boras as his agent, maybe the Indians can get that 4th year inserted if it’s guaranteed. Team option beyond the third year? Forget about it.
Be great if he could lock him up for the 4th year, but Boras will probably leverage a likely prime year of production for tons of money on the back end years of a contract. He might get 6-7 years from the Dodgers (large Korean immigrant population) or the Yanks.
by Bogalusa Bomber on Nov 25, 2010 5:26 AM EST up reply actions
Apropos of something: BA has crisp diagrams up detailing Tribe fall from 2007. Second page of slide show is kinda neat, showing what they call devolution of roster from 07 to 10. But the thing that stands out is how they took advantage of declining fortunes via trade. A pretty ruthless shedding of trade-able assets to restock quickly.
I went down the chart and kept saying -“good trade… good trade… had to do it… nice trade..”, etc.
The other obvious piece of data is the first page of the slide show, showing how attendance, for this team in this town, is directly and immediately related to performance. We had to trade the marquee players because attendance revenue is directly tied to extending those players, and revenue from butts in the seats IS the only gravy dollars this team has.
Simply put: the Tribe budget is directly related to every win and every loss. There isn’t any leeway – a 37-45 record at the midpoint of ‘08 necessitates CC’s trade and essentially locks the Tribe into rebuilding mode. Winning 8 of those games, having a 45-37 record, might mean something completely different.
8 more wins and we’re in contention, hold on to CC and take the draft compensation.
I hold back at least 3 Ambriz jokes a week.
8 more wins and we have CC and Lee down the stretch and a lot more money from attendance revenue, and may not have to do the complete payroll dumping we did the next year.
Of course, 8 more wins and we’re a better team than we actually were, but the basic point is that in April ’08 Cleveland is an organization that has committed $$ (Haf, Westy) and is looking to continue a playoff run into a bright future with great attendance, and 3 months later is pretty much resigned to continued declining attendance and a reduced payroll.
That’s a very abrupt and large change in outlook, stemming from a relatively small amount of games lost rather than won.
This is just not true. We had a higher payroll in April 2009 than in April 2008.
If we have any kind of contribution from Carmona, Westbrook and Adam Miller in either of those seasons, things might have been different. But not only didn’t that happen, a bunch of other things also went wrong in 2008, and we had terrible bullpens both years.
The more decisive inflection point was in 2009, but it never came down to a handful of games.
May 19 — 14-26 — then basically treaded water until …
June 27 — 31-45 — traded DeRosa, then lost a bunch more …
July 19 — 36-57 — after which we traded Rafael, Cliff and Victor …
So there never really was a moment when maybe the team goes one way, maybe another. It was a bad team, or at best (?) a team that played to the lowest percentiles of any kind of expected results.
The slight raise in ’09 payroll was largely locked in during ’08. By the time the season ended, attendance and its revenue had already started declining due to on-field performance. It was already deficit spending.
You’re right in that if we were competitive at the halfway point in ‘09, we wouldn’t have started dumping more salaries (and non-FA contract years in Vic’s and Lee’s case). But the ML team was losing more games than it won, just like the previous year, and that sealed a complete several year rebuild for a team that was already not performing well enuf to afford its own payroll.
And that’s the simple point – even when this FO makes a commitment when expectations are high (like going from 61M to 78M after the lucky ’07 run), its just a bet on future attendance. A half season of poor performance, measured in a relatively few amount of wins and losses, and it can all come tumbling down for several years. There is no slush fund – its all dependent on keeping attendance up, and the only way to do that, fireworks or no, is by fielding a competitive ML team.
Not to be a jerk, but it really might be helpful if you looked up some facts before making these posts.
Following the 2008 season, the Indians no longer had Sabathia, Byrd, Blake or Borowski on the payroll — a quartet who made $28.6 million in 2008. Some of that “savings” was spent on pre-programmed increases, notably to Hafner, Sizemore, Westbrook, Martinez and Peralta — but not all of it.
In order to get from $78 million to $81 million, they also had to add Kerry Wood and Mark DeRosa to the 2009 payroll, a total of $15.5 million. So it is fair to say that the club was still very much looking forward and continuing to invest in the present-day roster as 2009 rolled in.
Ownership is always gambling on winning, and that winning will lead to higher attendance. The Dolans have been doubly snakebit in that regard. Their clubs haven’t won as much as expected, and when they did win, attendance hasn’t gone up as much as expected. If they don’t plan on washing their hands of the club, it’s kind of a miracle if you think about it.
I’m not a Dolans Are Cheap guy – they have ponied up when asked, even when it was a bet against future income. I had forgotten how much they spent on Wood, but even though attendance had declined, they still had to replace their closer and 3B, and that was going to cost money.
I’m not saying that they threw in the towel after they lost 8 games in ‘08. I’m saying that a small difference in wins and losses can force them to make decisions that have long term consequences.
Let’s say the team was close to as good as they thought in ‘08 – playoff calibre. A winning record at the halfway point, a stretch run with CC and Cy Lee on the mound, and instead of attendance dropping from ’07’s 2.2 mill, it rises significantly. Season tix for ’09 get a bump. Already may be in a position to hold onto Lee and Vic the next year regardless of record, etc. But by the time they were 37-45 rather than 45-37, that scenario had vanished.
The reality is that in order to sustain a competitive budget, this team has to draw at least league average attendance to support it. And the only way to do that is by having a ML team that wins more than it loses.
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